by Roy Porter
9 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, to Jean Le Clerc (1706), quoted in B. Rand, The Life, Unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 353. Shaftesbury began his ‘Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’ by observing that modern Britons were fortunate to live in a culture of criticism: 1688 made all the difference: ‘I think Late England since the Revolution, to be better… than Old England by many a degree’: Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), vol. i, p. 10.
10 Any naive belief in an ‘age of reason’ was destroyed by Carl Becker's waspish The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932). For the concept of modernity, see Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air (1983), and Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity (1998), who notes (p. 10) that it has been stated that ‘against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, modernity is associated with the release of the individual from the bonds of tradition, with the progressive differentiation of society, with the emergence of civil society, with political equality, with innovation and change. All of these accomplishments are associated with capitalism, industrialism, secularisation, urbanisation and rationalisation.’
11 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, vol. i: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1967), vol. ii: The Science of Freedom (1970).
12 Influential in revisionism was Robert Darnton, ‘In Search of the Enlightenment’ (1971), and ‘The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France’ (1982); see also Haydn T. Mason (ed.), The Darnton Debate (1998). Outram, The Enlightenment, offers a succinct survey of Enlightenment historiography.
13 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951), p. 174. Compare John Sturt Mill's verdict that Bentham ‘was not a great philosopher’: F. R. Leavis (ed.), Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (1962), p. 48.
14 L. M. Marsak (ed.), The Enlightenment (1972); L. G. Crocker (ed.), The Age of Enlightenment (1969). Robert Anchor's The Enlightenment Tradition (1967), a general survey, discusses only one Briton more than passingly: David Hume (pp. 61–4). Among the nineteen Enlightenment protagonists she biographically spotlights, Dorinda Outram includes just two Britons, Locke and Newton, unaccountably omitting Hume, Bentham and Smith: see The Enlightenment, pp. 128–32.
15 James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment? (1996). There is a reason for this: the book focuses on Kant. An honourable exception is Isaac Kramnick (ed.), The Portable Enlightenment Reader (1995).
16 J. V. Price, ‘Religion and Ideas’ (1978); Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1969), p. 281; A. R. Humphreys, The Augustan World (1954); Pat Rogers, The Augustan Vision (1974); Kenneth Clark, quoted in R. W. Harris, Reason and Nature in the Eighteenth Century (1968), p. 234; for similar judgements, see Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry, a Historical Sketch 1590–1950 (1967), ch. 3.
17 Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason (1977), p. 4; Robert R. Palmer, ‘Turgot: Paragon of the Continental Enlightenment’ (1976), p. 608. Some years earlier Alfred Cobban deemed the term Enlightenment ‘hardly naturalized in English’: In Search of Humanity (1960), p. 7.
18 W. O. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975); and see the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989- ), under ‘Enlightenment’. For ‘illuminati’ etc., see Richard van Dülmen, The Society of the Enlightenment (1992), p. 105.
19 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1973), quoted by Arthur Wilson, ‘The Enlightenment Came First to England’ (1983), p. 3. Wilson acknowledges the Enlightenment in England, but oddly claims that its contribution was over by c.1700 (p. 4).
On philistinism: ‘I wish I may be well enough to listen to these intellectuals,’ sighed Lord Byron as early as 1813: quoted in Raymond Williams, Keywords (1988), p. 141 – see Williams's wider discussion of the introduction of the largely negative ‘intellectual’; see also W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (1957), and, for a knockabout example of British anti-intellectualism, Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (1988).
20 John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion (1976). The most heinous charge there levelled against English free-thinkers was that they ‘endangered the Church and most severely [sic] led to a seeming decay of manners’ (p. 196). Redwood's opinionated book at least recognizes how radically old tenets were attacked – it truly was an age of crisis in a ‘divided society’. It must be used with extra caution, since it is riddled with factual errors, mostly uncorrected in the 1996 reprint. Mention should also be made of John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment (1994), which recognizes the phenomenon described in this book.
21 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (1985), and Revolution and Rebellion (1986). Clark's denial of enlightenment on the grounds that ‘no one in the English-speaking world then referred to “the Enlightenment” ’ is wilful: The Language of Liberty (1994), p. 14: after all, many contemporaries spoke of ‘this enlightened age’. For critiques, see Joanna Innes, ‘Jonathan Clark, Social History, and England's Ancien Regime’ (1987); G. S. Rousseau: ‘Revisionist Polemics’ (1989); Frank O'Gorman, ‘Recent Historiography of the Hanoverian Regime’ (1986); Jeremy Black, ‘ “England's Ancien Regime”?’ (1988).
22 Indeed, not only no controversy, but a dearth of syntheses. The last major survey of Georgian thought is, almost unbelievably, Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1876! Though himself an agnostic, and hence a child of the Enlightenment, Stephen's tone is schoolmasterly, berating sceptics for being glib rather than honest doubters like himself. Few Victorians sympathized with the age. The Oxford don Mark Pattison bantered that ‘the genuine Anglican omits that period from the history of the Church altogether’: B. W. Young, ‘Knock-Kneed Giants’ (1993), p. 87. For debates on the ‘scientific revolution’, see chapter 6.
23 F. M. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (1926 [1733]), pp. 41–2; Ahmad Gunny, Voltaire and English Literature (1979). In 1753 Voltaire congratulated William Lee, an English Grand Tourist, upon coming from ‘the only nation where the least shadow of liberty remains in Europe’: Jeremy Black, Convergence or Divergence? (1994), pp. 144–5; for discussion, see Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1988), p. 11. For other admiring visitors to England, see A. C. Cross, ‘By the Banks of the Thames’ (1980).
24 See the introduction in F. M. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1962 [1764]), p. 9.
25 Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, pp. 73, 76. Voltaire declared: ‘Perhaps no Man ever had a more judicious or more methodical Genius, or was a more acute Logician than Mr Locke.’
26 Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes (1875–7), vol. ii, p. 80. Voltaire and Montesquieu, ‘the true originators’ of the Enlightenment, ‘were the pupils and followers of England's philosophers and great men’: quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. i, p. 12, from Oeuvres complètes, vol. iii, p. 416.
27 Quoted in Joseph Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (1899), pp. 86–7.
28 Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, p. 260.
29 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (1966 [1796]), p. 125; Josephine Grieder, Anglomania in France, 1740–1789 (1985).
30 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971), p. 67.
31 Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, vol. iii, p. 416, quoted in Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. i, p. 12.
32 Norman Torrey, Voltaire and the English Deists (1930); Ahmad Gunny, Voltaire and English Literature (1979); I. O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (1977), vol. i, ch. 5; M. C. Jacob, ‘Newtonianism and the Origins of the Enlightenment’ (1977); and Ross Hutchison, Locke in France (1688–1734) (1991). Benjamin Franklin acknowledged Wollaston's The Religion of Nature Delineated as crucial to his mental development: Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenment of Benjamin Franklin (1997), p. 6; Franco
Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971), p. 60.
33 R. L. Cru, Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought (repr. 1966), ch. 3.
34 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1954 [1781–8]), p. 110. The Spectator was translated into French in 1714, the Guardian in 1725, the Tatler in 1734.
35 Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentham, An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748–1792 (1962), p. 4.
36 See A. Rupert Hall, ‘Newton in France: A New View’ (1975). For long, Newton was synonymous with English supremacy. A Greek science journal stated early in the nineteenth century: ‘After Bacon, dawned Newton, to the brilliance and eternal glory of England’: George N. Vlahakis, ‘The Greek Enlightenment in Science’ (1999), p. 330.
37 Dorat, ‘Idée de la poesie allamande’ (1768), p. 43, quoted in Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, p. 335.
38 Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (1995[1751]), p. 109.
39 Cru, Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought, p. 351. Diderot and Sterne were friends. Shakespeare swept Germany in the early 1770s. Ossian enjoyed a great vogue, James Macpherson's Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands (1760) being translate into German (1768), French (1777), Russian (1792), Dutch (1805), Danish (1807–9) and Czech (1827), while it also figured in the plot of Goethe's Werther (1774): Jeremy Black, Convergence or Divergence? (1994), p. 155. Lichtenberg vowed to give up Klopstock's Messias ‘twice over’ for a small part of Robinson Crusoe: M. L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell, Lichtenberg's Visits to England as Described in his Letters and Diaries (1938), p. xxiii.
40 Quoted in Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature, p. 335.
41 Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair (1976), p. 10.
42 Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. 1, p. 3. Gay's emphasis on the homogeneity of the Enlightenment was challenged early by Betty Behrens in her review in the Historical Journal (1968), pp. 190–95; see also Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976).
43 L. M. Marsak (ed.), The Enlightenment (1972), p. 3; Lester G. Crocker, introduction to John W. Yolton (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (1991), p. 1. For France as the ‘hearth’ of the Enlightenment, see Darnton, ‘George Washington's False Teeth’. Daniel Roche calls Paris the ‘capital of the Enlightenment’: France in the Enlightenment (1998), p. 641.
44 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959–64).
45 The Enlightenment has also been read through the prism of ‘modernization theory’: A. M. Wilson, ‘The Philosophes in the Light of Present-day Theories of Modernization’ (1967); H. B. Applewhite and D. G. Levy, ‘The Concept of Modernization and the French Enlightenment’ (1971); Joyce Appleby, ‘Modernization Theory and the Formation of Modern Social Theories in England and America’ (1978).
46 Gay, The Enlightenment, vol. i, p. 3.
47 J. H. Plumb, In the Light of History (1972), lamented how ‘very few’ eighteenth-century Englishmen adopted a ‘materialist philosophy’ and explained this as a revival of ‘unreason’. The implied contrast with France is questionable. With such thinkers as Hartley, Priestley and Erasmus Darwin, England had its fair share, as later chapters will document.
48See the discussions, for instance, in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981).
49 For the French High Enlightenment as ‘a pretty mild affair’, see Robert Darnton, ‘In Search of the Enlightenment’, pp. 118–19.
50 A. C. Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie (1976), has shown how conventional were the lives even of most of d'Holbach's circle – as one might expect from their titled backgrounds.
51 According to D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth Century Britain (1990), pp. 10–11: ‘to the extent that the French Enlightenment had anything like a British counterpart, it was located not in England but in Scotland.’
52 In any case, certain systematic writings were indeed produced, notably Bentham's gargantuan codification of the law.
53 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator (1965), vol. i, no. 10, p. 44 (12 March 1711); Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (1927), V.iv.10, pp. 434–5. For pioneering studies of the social production of knowledge and letters, see J. H. Plumb, ‘The Public, Literature and the Arts in the Eighteenth Century’ (1972), and The Commercialization of Leisure 1973); Pat Rogers, Grub Street (1972). See chapter 4 below.
54 Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, p. 42; Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context. See the reflections on Englishness in Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (1976).
55 E. P. Thompson hoped to rescue thepoor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’: The Making of the English Working Class (1968), p. 13.
56 Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, p. 58.
57 J. H. Plumb, ‘Reason and Unreason in the Eighteenth Century’, in In the Light of History (1972), pp. 23–4. A fine study which bears out Plumb's remarks is Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (1995).
58 For social change, see J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England (1987); Trevor May, An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1760–1970 (1987); John Rule, Albion's People (1992), and The Vital Century (1992); Jeremy Black, An Illustrated History of Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1793 (1996); Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1990).
59 C. Hibbert (ed.), An American in Regency England (1968), p. 47.
60 R. Nettel (ed.), Journeys of a German in England in 1782 (1965), p. 33.
61 A. F. Prévost, Mémoires et aventures d'un homme de qualité (1927 [1728–31]), p. 136.
62 R. Brimley Johnson (ed.), Bluestocking Letters (1926), p. 90.
63 Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy (1766), vol. ii, pp. 197–8. See also C. Maxwell, The English Traveller in France, 1698-1815 (1932); Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers (1999).
64 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1975 [1690]), bk I, ch. 1, para. 6, p. 46. See also J. L. Axtell, The Educational Works of John Locke (1968); Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in J. Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965 [1733–4]), P. 516, l. 2.
65 For example, the development of a political economy (see chapter 17 below). Utilitarianism is the blueprint for a capitalist economy.
66 The phrase is Adam Smith's: Lectures on Jurisprudence (1982 [1762–3]), vol. iv, p. 163.
67 [John Gay], ‘A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criterion of Virtue’, in W. King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil (1721), pp. xvii–xviii.
68 W. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), p. 61.
69 Joseph Priestley, Lectures On History (1793), vol. ii, p. 47.
70 See Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), sermon xi, p. 70, discussed in Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police (1989), p. 39. See also Christopher Cunliffe (ed.), Joseph Butler's Moral and Religious Thought (1992).
71 Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy (1788), vol. ii, p. 231. See also J. A. Passmore, Priestley's Writings on Philosophy, Science and Politics (1965), p. 260.
72 Madame du Boccage, Letters concerning England, Holland and Italy (1770), vol. i, pp. 28–9.
73 H. C. Robbins-Landon, Haydn in England 1791–1795 (1976), p. 97. Haydn's concerts and commissions earned him extraordinary fees. Netting £800 from his benefit concert in 1794, he commented, ‘this one can only make in England’.
74 E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971).
75 J. Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man (1970), pp. 158f.
76 Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame And bade self-love and social be the same.
Alexander Pope, An Essa
y of Man, bk III, ll. 317–18, in J. Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 535; C. H. Vereker, Eighteenth-Century Optimism (1967); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936).
77 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1999 [1711]), vol. i, p. 273.
78 Sir F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor (1797), vol. i, p. 468. Eden is here drawing upon Adam Smith.
79 ‘There is no place in the world, where a man may live more according to his own mind, or even his whims, than in London’: Pastor Wendeborn, A View of England (1791), vol. i, p. 184.
80 See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977), ch. 9; J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of the Children in Eighteenth-Century England’ (1975); D. Owen, English Philanthropy, 1660–1960 (1965); B. Rodgers, Cloak of Charity: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy (1949). The capitalist economy, licensed by Enlightenment political economy, was, of course, creating the very ills which this humanitarianism wished to stamp out.